This module will lay the foundation for the entire course by asking a deceptively simple question: what is "God" in the Sikh tradition? We will explore how the Guru Granth Sahib speaks of the Divine — formless (nirgun) yet described through qualities (sargun) — and how divine qualities are expressed purposefully, through narrative.

We will then examine how the Guru Granth Sahib and the wider sant tradition positioned themselves against the worship of the Goddess, reading the striking verses of Kabir, Namdev, and the Gurus concerning Devi and Shakti. The supplementary academic reading by Dr. Patton Burchett will situate these verses within a North India-wide devotional critique of goddess worship and tantra. The module closes with a story about Guru Arjan from the Sikhān Dī Bhagatmālā (18th century) that complicates any simple picture.

This module enters the Punjab Hills — a landscape saturated with Goddess worship, where Anandpur was founded in the shadow of the Naina Devi temple. Drawing on the 17th-century Persian text Dabistān-i-Mazāhib, we will meet a region whose people, as its author observed, were worshippers of Shakti.

Against this backdrop we will explore Guru Gobind Singh's darbar as a literary powerhouse — its poets, its Braj literary culture, and martial poetry as a prestigious courtly genre across North India. We will read selections from Jaap Sahib and Akal Ustat, where the Divine is praised as timeless, weapon-wielding, and protective, and from the Bachittar Natak, with its striking invocations of Mahakal and the Devi — closing with the avatar narratives that lead into the Goddess stories.

The heart of the course: the three retellings of the Goddess's battles — Chandi Charitar Ukti Bilās, Chandi Charitar, and the Punjabi Chandi dī Vār, whose opening verse begins the Ardās recited by Sikhs daily.

We will first gain the necessary background in the Sanskrit Devī Māhātmya of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa— the root text of the Goddess tradition — and then read the retellings closely in translation. What are these stories about? Why three versions? The module demonstrates why these compositions are not simply translations (anusār) of the Purāṇas: their framing verses, their martial poetics (vīr ras), and their distinctly Sikh purposes.

The final module asks what Sikhs have made of these texts across three centuries. We will examine the famous Naina Devi narrative — the story that Guru Gobind Singh performed a great fire-rite to summon the Goddess before creating the Khalsa — tracing its tellings from 18th-century sources through Kavi Santokh Singh's Sūraj Prakāsh, alongside a very different story: the Dabistān's account of a Sikh of Guru Hargobind who broke the nose of a Devi idol and mocked her powerlessness.

The module's centerpiece is a text few have encountered: Bhai Vir Singh's Devī Pūjan Nirṇay, the remarkable fifty-page research essay he inserted into his edition of the Sūraj Prakāsh — read here in English translation for the first time. Watching this foundational modern scholar argue, we will see precisely how, and when, the tradition's older comfort with the Goddess corpus became the modern debate.